A parody on the law: organized labor, the convict
lease, and immigration in the making of the Texas state
Capitol.

Abstract:

In 1884, the Texas Capitol's builders brought prisoners from
the state's convict, lease to cut costs and maximize profits.
Members of the National Granite Cutters Union were outraged, and refused
to train the prisoners to work on such a symbolically important project.
In response, the builders sent to Aberdeen, Scotland, and, in direct
violation of the Foran Act, contracted Scots workers to break the
Union's boycott. Prisoners resisted exploitation in numerous ways,
but the granite cutters, white men with citizenship status, brought
legal suit against the builders. The subjects of this literal story of
state-formation--black, white, and Mexican convicts, skilled Scottish
immigrants, organized white male workers and their enemies--confronted
each other's visions of American citizenship. Moreover, the case
revealed how the Foran. Act's meaning was transformed from its
original intent--skilled workers trying to exclude skilled
strikebreakers--to the nativist prohibition of pauper labor. It also
revealed the how the convict lease system was refined to support an
emergent segregated system. In each stage of building the capitol, the
large lessons were clear. Elites who broke the law would be hardly
penalized, while a poor man who stole a cow could be worked to death.

Name: Journal of Social History Publisher: Journal of Social History Audience: Academic Format: Magazine/Journal Subject: History; Sociology and social work Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Journal of Social
History ISSN:0022-4529

Octavio Aleman, age forty-five, and Joaquin Duran, age twenty-two,
both of Comargo, Mexico, were arrested on November 25, 1885 in Starr
County, Texas. Aleman, a farmer, was arrested for cow theft, and Duran,
a barber, for stealing a horse. They were sentenced to two years, and
five years, respectively, at hard labor in the Texas convict lease. On
December 22, they were sent to "Granite Mountain," the quarry
in Burnet County, to hew the red stone from which the Texas State
Capitol was being built. Six months later Octavio Aleman was dead
"from the effects of overheating"--worked to death under the
June Texas sun. Joaquin Duran, younger and perhaps stronger, survived to
work in the quarries for another eight months, until February 25,1887,
when he was granted a full pardon by Governor L. S. Ross. Upon review of
the case, Ross determined that Duran was not actually guilty of stealing
a horse. In addition, Ross wrote that "Joaquin Duran was tried with
no lawyer or defender" and that "he knew nothing of the
English language." At the urging of a large number of the citizens
of Starr County, Governor Ross finally pronounced "this man ought
not to have been convicted." One year and four months after his
wrongful arrest, and after the death of Octavio Aleman, Joaquin Duran
was a free man once again. (1)

In Aberdeen, Scotland, other granite cutters faced their own
troubles. Known for the gray in its skies and the stone in its
buildings, the Granite City was in an economic slump. Newspapers
advertised for skilled granite cutters around the world, and younger
cutters were often willing to oblige for the promise of wages,
experience, and adventure. The March 15, 1886 Aberdeen Evening Gazette
announced work on "the Capitol Building of Texas, which is to be
second only in America to the Capitol Building of Washington." (2)
Prestigious work, then, and good wages to boot. The Aberdonians who
signed on scarcely knew the turmoil they would enter on arrival in the
United States, or that they were being used to break a strike by the
American National Granite Cutters Union. Nor could they have predicted
that some would testify before Congress a few years later, because the
Capitol builders hired them in direct violation of the Foran Act, also
known as the Anti-Immigrant Contract Labor Act, passed the year before
their arrival. As members of the American National Granite Cutters'
Union (NGCU) would lament, "What a parady (sic) on the laws of
Texas! [T]he State Government furnishing state convicts' to a
violator o( the United States Laws!" (3)

The construction of the Texas State Capitol provides insight into
the global nature of late 19th century American political economies, the
repressive effects of the law, and the calibrations of citizenship and
its denials in a particularly symbolic site. Here, the convict lease,
the labor movement and its enemies, and international migrants joined to
produce a piece of monumental architecture and, in the process, test
newly-passed federal legislation. The subjects of this literal story of
state-formation--black, white, and Mexican convicts; organized white
male workers; and skilled Scottish immigrants--each confronted different
aspects of American citizenship, a form of national belonging
differentiated by identity, power, and struggle. Prisoners were denied
nearly every aspect of their being: criminal conviction and the 13th
Amendment enforced a legal status that removed not just legal rights,
but threatened their very biological existence. Yet, as became cleat in
the capitol quarries, such denials were increasingly structured by race,
and did not operate uniformly across the convict lease system. (4) In
contrast to the convicts, organized granite cutters--white men with
formal citizen standing--made claims for substantive economic
citizenship, which they felt that the state and powerful business
interests denied them. (5) The NGCU, joined by the Knights of Labor,
used legal means to assert those claims: first, through strikes and
later, through legal suit. The case the NGCU brought against the
Capitol's builders reveals an absent chapter in the history of
immigration law, demonstrating how the Foran Act's meaning was
transformed from its original intent--skilled workers trying to exclude
skilled strikebreakers--to the nativist prohibition of
"pauper" labor, which has seized public and historical
interest ever since. (6) Differing from both the prisoners and the
organized American granite cutters, the Scots migrants displayed
something of an aspirational citizenship. Countless migrants shared
their desires of American belonging, but the Scots' esteemed skill,
recognized whiteness, and manliness made them candidates for legal
citizenship and national entry--all qualities that would undercut the
NGCU's case--and permitted them entry despite the Gilded Age's
increasingly restrictive notions of citizenship. In each stage of
building the capitol, the lessons were clear. Elites who broke the law
would be hardly penalized, while a man who stole a cow could be worked
to death.

Ninety delegates from across Texas met in late 1875 to design a new
constitution that would dismantle the emancipatory gains of
Reconstruction and return Texas to a nostalgically evocative if
currently enacted form, of white rule. They discussed frontier warfare
against native peoples; how to eject remaining radicals from the state
house; reduce the amount of debt; and the need for a new Capitol
building that would pronounce the grandeur of all things Texan. (7)
Texas was in many ways a besieged state, threatened from within the
ranks of citizens by Populists and Socialists, from so-called criminals
and bandits, from Apache and Comanche Indians to the West, and from
Mexicans to the South. Ideologues in the conservative Texas press called
for a statehouse that could simultaneously absorb and tame threats to
political legitimacy. If states "state" their authority in
daily life, public ritual, and architecture, the Capitol itself would be
an important instantiation of state power. The lessons of the statehouse
were meant for one and all to understand at a glance, proclaiming the
government's righteousness, sovereignty, and durability.

Little headway was made in building the capitol until 1879, when it
was determined that the only way to pay for the building would be by
making use of public land, the cash-poor state's most abundant
asset. To this end, the Capitol Board made some three million acres of
land in the Texas panhandle available to the builders of the capitol. A
fire burned down the existing Capitol, adding considerable urgency to
the project, and the construction contract changed hands until it landed
with the firm of Taylor, Babcock and Company. Known as the Capitol
Syndicate or the Chicago Syndicate, this august group included Col.
Abner Taylor, Illinois Representative to the U.S. Congress; Charles B.
Farwell, U.S. Senator from Illinois; John V Farwell; and Amos Babcock, a
large Illinois landholder. The Capitol Freehold Land and Investment
Company, a consortium of British capitalists with authorized capital of
$15 million dollars, whose members included no less than the Earl of
Aberdeen, and Member of Parliament Sir Henry Seton-Karr, offered further
financial support. (8) Together, they played a considerable role in the
boom of late 19th century European speculative investment in the
American West. (9) The three million acre ranch the investors gained,
known as the "XIT Ranch," would remain in Texas lore for years
to come. (10)

A complication quickly arose for the builders when the limestone
that architects envisioned for the capitol proved unsuitable, because it
discolored with age. Favoring the use of "native Texan"
materials, the Capitol Building Commission decided upon a substantial
red granite deposit at Granite Mountain, fifteen miles south of the town
of Burnet. (11) However, the change to granite would increase building
costs, and, in order to offset these unforeseen expenses, the
contractors demanded that they he able to use convict workers and make
minor changes in the building plans. (12) The contractors would pay the
state sixty-five cents per day for each convict, and the state would be
responsible for feeding, clothing, and guarding the prisoners. (13)
Despite petitions from across the state, on July 25, 1885, the Governor
and Capitol Building Commission agreed to the contract. (14) Prisoners
soon began laying the necessary railroad to connect the quarries to main
railroad lines and erected the buildings that would house inmates at the
quarries. Convict workers labored in the Oatmanville and Granite
Mountain quarries from late October, 1885, until May 20, 1887. (15)

Texas was hardly unique among American states that found the
convict lease both profitable and expeditious in the management of its
growing prison populations after the Civil War. Across the South--and
this element of Texas life rendered it "southern"--large
numbers of former slaves and their children were criminalized for
vagrancy or petty theft, previously tolerated acts that became radically
punishable during and after Reconstruction. Large institutions at
Huntsville and Rusk formed the Texas Prison System's administrative
core. Officials had experimented with leasing the entire prison system
to private entrepreneurs, but by 1884 the state assumed control of
Huntsville and Rusk. They continued leasing prisoners to private farms
and railroad builders, however, in hopes of keeping the profits made.
This form of the lease "ushered in a period of great prosperity for
the state." (16)

The convict lease formed a central strand in the web of racist
labor coercions and the return of Democratic rule in Texas, a web that
included debt peonage, tenant farming and sharecropping, anchored by
highly restrictive labor contracts. As the Reconstruction government was
dismantled, new repressive powers became manifest in systems of coercion
and punishment. The Texas prison population increased by approximately
700 percent between 1870 and 1912. (17) Black Texans made up one-fifth
of the statewide population across the lease era, but were three-fifths
of its state prisoners. A typical prisoner in Texas's lease era was
a young, black, illiterate male serving a first sentence for burglary or
theft, and, according to historian David Oshinsky, "his trial took
place without a lawyer, in a matter of minutes, before an all-white jury
prone to discount 'nigger testimony' as a pack of lies."
(18) Yet many saw even the patently cruel lease as too lenient. Lynch
rule would augment repressive state capacities, as whites deemed cursory
trials too dignified for blacks accused of egregious crimes, or for
challenging the numerous and shifting bases of white rule. (19) So too
did constabulary control extend further into the reaches of west Texas,
as military expeditions tried to wrest control of the land from the last
holdouts of indigenous resistance to colonization. (20) Texas differed
somewhat from its more strictly Southern neighbors in that Tejanos,
though formally recognized as racially white by the treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo, were in fact marginalized and exploited as
"greasers," and were similarly caught in the emergent webs of
racialized labor control. (21)

Convict labor dramatically advanced the Southern and Texan economy.
Forced to work at a set price and in conditions that no free worker
would tolerate, prisoners lay the very foundations for economic
modernization--placing railroad track, mining coal, harvesting
turpentine. Unlike the slaves or peons of a previous era, lessees had
neither property nor reciprocal relationships invested in convicts'
lives, and thus drove them as hard as possible while cutting every cost.
"This place is nine kinds of hell," reflected one leased
prisoner, "Am suffering death here every day." (22) Yet a
prisoner's hell was the leasee's heaven, for convicts were
unparalleled as exploitable workers. "Why?" mused one railroad
official, "Because he is a convict ... and if he dies it is a small
loss, and we can make him work there, while we cannot get free men to do
the same kind of labor for, say, six times as much as the convict
costs." (23) It is no surprise, then, that mortality rates could
reach astounding levels. Guards were quick to resort to lead or leather
to drive workers and prevent escape. Farmers living near Texas prison
camps complained that they could not sleep at night for "the groans
and entreaties of the convicts." (24) Officials responded by
gagging the prisoners to muffle their cries. (25)

However, some Texas reformers and nascent Progressives grew
concerned about the convict lease's brutality. (26) Humanitarians
believed that such violence undermined the moral Legitimacy of
government. They were especially concerned about the treatment of those
relatively few whites finding themselves on the wrong side of the law,
and forced into close proximity with black or Mexican criminals. White
criminals were commonly understood as "the lowest of their
race" and, as historian Edward Ayers notes, "racial lines
blurred in convict lease camps." One southern governor averred that
for those whites imprisoned for "the lower grades of homicide ...,
who are otherwise respectable ... [i]t is unjust to compel such men to a
daily association with thieves, robbers, and assassins." Ayers
continued, "It was wrong, in other words, to imprison together
white murderers and a black who had stolen a pig--it was unjust, to the
whites." (27) Texas officials would find ways to address this.

In the American South and West, where skilled workers were scarce,
strong unions could demand wages higher than their employers were
willing to pay. Southern entrepreneurs and politicians--usually cordial
friends--found in convicts a supply of workers to suit their needs
precisely to break those unions. The Capitol Syndicate and Gustav Wilke,
the lead agent to whom it had contracted the project, were no different.
Members of the Granite Cutters' Union were acquainted with Wilke
from the previous year when he used non-union workers to build the
capitol's water-table and foundation. (28) Shortly after they
learned about prisoners in the capitol quarries, the NGCU issued this
circular:

They felt the threat on numerous levels. First of all, unfree,
unwaged labor undercut the price of their labor. The Union agreed upon
and demanded "Austin wages," at $4-00 a day. Custom had it
that the Union would demand prices based on those of the neatest
quarry--in this case, Graniteville, Missouri, where wages were $3.50 per
day. Wilke had offered "about the Graniteville bill of prices"
instead of Austin wages, and this was unacceptable to NGCU members. (30)
A different circular warned all granite cutters of the dangers of
working with Wilke and with convicted workers, "If 200 granite
cutters work with, and teach 100 convicts the trade the probability is
that in twelve months time there will be but 100 granite cutters and the
number of convicts would be increased to 200." They continued that
"if free granite cutters learn convicts the trade," convicts
would train other convicts "and thus drive out free labor all
together." (31) Moreover, bringing convicts into the granite
cutters' trade challenged both older traditions of restrictive
artisanal craft apprenticeship as well as emergent trade unionism. Much
of the ideology and fragile pride behind the cutters' words was
based on the understanding of "skill." as a political
definition in separating members of the privileged working class from
relatively weaker members. (32) There was a distinction between
"quarrying" granite, and "cutting" granite. Cutting
granite involved shaping the quarried but still unfinished stone into
its final shape and dimensions according to architectural plans, and was
understood to be the more delicate and technically difficult craft. This
bad been established as the privileged domain of the economically
independent, white, manly union workers. When convicts began to work in
the quarries, black, Mexican, and poor white men began to learn the
skills and secrets of the stonecutters' trade.

The Union responded with an overwhelming vote to boycott the
capitol building project, officially calling it a "scab" job.
(33) They also threatened to ostracize any cutter who worked on the
building. The names of the few who did were listed in the Granite
Cutter's Journal, along with denigrating remarks and symbolic
ousting from the brotherhood. (34) The scabs' identities
"should not be forgotten by the union for they have worked
faithfully for Wilkie [sic] to keep the men from striking." (35) In
December 1885, the Austin Statesman, whose repotting consistently
supported the Capitol builders, encouraged mote workers to break the
strike: "Keep away from all alliances that prevent you from earning
an honest livelihood and take the work offered by Mr. Wilkie[sic] if he
will pay a fair price for it." (36) Drawing on classic liberal and
Bourbon Democratic reasoning, the Statesman justified using prisoners:
"If the state refused to use its convicts to cut the stone you
would have to be taxed to pay for the feeding and clothing, medical
attention, etc., of these convicts ... in elegant ease and
idleness." (37) Such descriptions of the convict lease or
penitentiary life could hardly have been further from the truth. The
Statesman's appeals to protecting citizens as taxpayers repressed
the granite cutters' vision of producerist citizenship, in which
states should protect white male citizens at the point of production,
rather than as taxpayers.

The NGCU mixed metaphors when they referred to the "convicts,
scabs and imported contract labor," which brought "slavery
into our trade." Yet their language consistently invoked themes of
degradation, indications of their implicitly raced and gendered concern
over the status of their labor, and themselves, and their citizenship.
The Knights of Labor made similar claims when they supported the NGCU,
resolving that no " K. of L. or Union man ... who considers himself
better than a serf would work for Wilke." (38) But if these claims
cut downward against convicts, slavery metaphors were also strategic
attacks against global capitalism and an unjust state by claiming the
moral belonging of free male citizens. (39) Much as Theresa Case has
shown of the Texas Knights of Labor in 1885 and 1886, movement against
both the convict lease and immigrant (especially Chinese) laborers on
railroads shored skilled and unskilled white workers' identities as
white men and American citizens. (40) By hiring convicts and scabs,
Wilke challenged the prestige of granite cutting, simultaneously
assaulting the Union workers' white racial status, their manhood as
independent mechanics capable of earning a family wage, and their
economic standing as organized members of the working class, and their
belonging as American citizens. (41) They were forced to act.

With the support of the Knights of Labor, then some 700,000 strong,
the National Granite Cutters' Union boycott was effective enough
that Wilke had difficulty finding skilled workers to train the prisoners
to quarry and cut the granite in Burnet and the limestone that would be
taken from the quarry at Oatmanville. The boycott was literally
concurrent with the final days of the Great Southwest Strike, and the
Knights of Labor, though weakened by confrontation with Jay Gould's
railroads, were still near the apex of their power. In April 1886, Wilke
sent George Berry, an employee and assistant foreman, to Aberdeen,
Scotland, in search of skilled granite cutters to break the strike. The
Capitol Syndicate bought advertisements in newspapers and listing
meetings to be held in Aberdeen. The Aberdeen Evening Gazette announced
"Wanted, 150 Granite Cutters; Blacksmiths." Generally
unsympathetic stories about the "mobs" and
"incendiaries" of Knights of Labor doing battle with Jay
Gould's railroads were interspersed with the ads for the Texas
Granite Cutters, which may have influenced the Aberdonians'
perceptions of labor conflict in the U.S. (42)

It is unclear precisely how Aberdeen was chosen as the site to
supply the desired strikebreakers, but the Earl of Aberdeen's
presence as a prime investor in the Capitol Freehold Land and Investment
Company surely played as much a role as the city's reputation for
stonemasonry. Advertisements for stonecutters wanted in the US and
Canada appeared almost daily in Aberdeen newspapers in March, April and
May 1886. Travel to the United States, Canada, or South Africa became
commonplace for Aberdonian granite cutters in the last decades of the
19th century. Often they stayed, but they frequently returned home with
enough savings to open small yards of their own. (43) Surely the
Earl's patronage networks helped motivate men and local fraternal
societies to support the venture.

Economic historians have suggested that Aberdeen was not in a
terrible crisis relative to the rest of Britain in the mid-1880s, but
feeling on the ground suggested otherwise. (44) As regional demand for
agricultural labor lessened in the 1880s, larger numbers of rural
migrants made their way to the city, and pools of available workers in
the quarrying districts deepened. (45) Moreover, trade unionism in
Aberdeen granite industries was in a relative lull. The Aberdeen Lodge
of the Scottish Operative Mason's Society had been crippled by
depression in the late 1870s and never regained its previous strength.
(46) Rather than unions, workers tended to rely on apprenticeship
traditions and the high degrees of skill involved in the granite trade
to limit participation in the labor market and to exert some control
over production. The small scale in most parts of the industry also may
have limited tendencies toward unionism. An Operative Masons' and
Granite Cutters' Union would form later in the decade, but its base
only existed within the City center and did not extend to wider areas.
Aberdonian granite workers would be inspired by the 1889 London dock
strike, but in 1886, when Berry called for granite cutters to travel to
Texas, relatively little support for trade unionism existed among
Aberdeen's granite workers, and the industry saw relatively few
labor disputes in the last decades of the 19th century. (47)

Berry held the first meeting in Aberdeen on March 31, 1886, and
others soon followed. Some three hundred men attended an April 12
meeting at the Northern Friendly Society's Hall. Newspapers
reported that around 100 cutters had already been secured. Berry led the
meeting and explained the details of the work and travel, which would be
paid for by the capitol builders. (48) He also called on Robert Hall, a
local employer and builder to speak. Hall called the project a
"grand opportunity" for Aberdeen's cutters. Hall had not
seen the economy this bad in twenty years, and suggested that migrants
who traveled to Texas would help themselves, and also those they left
behind. Hall had spent four years in South Carolina, which was
"about the same latitude as Texas," and he testified to the
region's "salubrious clime." (49) Apparently some of the
Aberdonians had heard that this was a scab job, and that they would be
working with prisoners, and Alexander Steele, who would later travel to
Texas, asked George Berry if this was the case. Berry, who dishonestly
claimed to be a member of the NGCU, admitted that it was. He also said
that convicts were only being used because insufficient tree labor was
available, and that the Granite Cutters' Union "scabbed the
job unjustly." Moreover, according to Steele, Berry promised that
"the convicts would be discharged" once the Scots arrived.
None of this would prove to be true. (50)

The Scots had little time to make their decision; they would leave
on the Anchor Line's ship Circassia the following Thursday morning.
Though the exact number of Aberdonians who left, for Texas is
unclear--it was probably eighty-six--a large crowd of friends gathered
and cheered to see them off. (51) When they arrived in New York ten days
later, they must have been surprised when three NGCU members met them on
the wharf at Castle Garden, and informed them in no uncertain terms that
they were being used as scabs. Berry was likely the most surprised of
all, when the NGCU members and a U.S. Deputy Marshall brought him to the
New York U.S. District Attorney's office for investigation into
violation of the Foran Act. The Act, passed just months before, made it
illegal

Violators of the Act would be fined $1000 for each immigrant
contracted to labor in the United States. (52) Because the NGCU members
could not the produce proof that the Scots were brought to the U. S.
under contract, Berry was released to continue the trip to Texas.
Twenty-four of the Scots, convinced by the Granite Cutters' pleas,
broke from the party to seek unionized work in the northeast. The rest
continued. (53)

Alexander Greig related his journey to the Lone Star State in a
letter published in the Aberdeen Evening Gazette. Greig marveled at the
size of the cities and the distances between them, the beauty of
landscapes he crossed. "This is the most splendid country I have
ever seen." (54) Yet terrors came with the thrills. Their train
narrowly missed a disastrous derailment, and neatly as unsettling were
the "enormous amount of niggers" in the country--a reference
suggesting that regardless of what others may have felt, he had little
doubt of his relative whiteness. (55) After eighteen days and seventeen
nights of travel, during which many complained of the high costs of food
on the long journey, Greig and his fellow migrants finally arrived to a
"hearty welcome from the people of Burnet." He found himself
in "a good house, a good bed, and [eating] good meat, and 1 think
... a nice landlord." Given reports of their previous diet and the
variance of working class housing in and around Aberdeen, the initial
impression must have been quite good. (56) "You can tell anybody
who asks about us that everything is right, and that we have been
treated well." They began work right, away.

Apparently they quickly soured on the project. Perhaps Greig became
disenchanted too. Though he promised to send weekly letters to his
family, he never wrote them, or if he did, they were not published. (57)
The Galveston Daily News reported "Bitter feelings and homesickness
... cropping out everywhere" among the Scots cutters. Berry
promised the Scots in Aberdeen that once free workers were secured, the
prisoners would be returned and all the stone would be "cut ...
with white labor." Instead, more convicts arrived. (58) The Scots
found themselves working under grim conditions, and must have began to
feel like prisoners themselves. The work shed they had been promised
never materialized, and surely the eight-foot high fence that surrounded
their workspace contributed to their discontent. "Working out in
the sun with the thermometer standing at 80 or 90, and four to six men
packed in a lodging room ... along with indifferent food, is something
that was not calculated upon." (59) More shockingly, three of the
Scots had died by October 1886. In addition, along with American-born
strikebreakers, they were ostracized by members of the granite
cutters' union, who posted their names in circulars and denounced
them as traitors, prostitutes, "foreign mercenaries,"
and--just as bad--inept workmen. Prisoners reportedly called John
Morrison (from Massachusetts) "Bummecky John," after a mixture
used to cover up botched corners. (60) It appears that at least some of
the Scots were unskilled--perhaps they had been idle in Aberdeen for a
reason. Advertisements for replacements in later Aberdeen papers would
warn that only "men of undoubted ability and good character need
apply," suggesting something about the workmanship of the previous
migrants. (61) In any case, the conditions in the quarries may have
politicized the remaining Scots; at the very least, many did what the
convicted workers could not do so easily: they left. By May 1887 only
fifteen of the original Aberdonians remained, still honoring the
contracts they had signed before crossing the Atlantic. (62)

Granite Mountain quarry lay about fifteen miles south of the town
of Burnet, among the rolling hills, live oak trees, and creeks and
washes that give this area its reputation as one of the most beautiful
parts of Texas. Part of the Llano Uplift, Granite Mountain is a
basolith--a large rounded layer of granite uncovered through the erosion
of the soil that once covered it. Granite Mountain was girded by the
narrow gauge railroad that free and convicted workers built in the
summer and fall of 18S5. Prisoners in the quarries used large air-engine
derricks to load the granite blocks onto mule-drawn flatbed railroad
cars. The convicts then drove the train to the cutting yard, where other
prisoners shaped the granite according to Wilke's specifications. A
high picket and barbed wire fence enclosed the cutting yard, which was
situated on about two acres of land. Some sixty prisoners cut granite
here, supervised by an experienced, free granite cutter, likely a
Scottish immigrant or perhaps a local strikebreaker. Next to the yard,
and within the fence, stood the prisoners' quarters: a large
"L" shaped, whitewashed wooden building, with grates across
the windows. The two wings, built at right angles to each other, were
lined with bunks, and a trough ran along the wall of one wing. The
"dining room" ran the length of one of the wings, and was
filled with long tables and benches, where all the convicts, black,
white and Mexican, ate together. Some cooking was done outside in large
iron pots, and the smell of the food, according to one report, was
"neither appetizing nor savory." In the kitchen proper, three
workers could be found cutting onions into a large pan or working up
immense batches of bread to feed the nearly 400 workers and guards.
Three others would be washing dishes virtually around the clock. Nearby
were the administrative buildings, and also nearby stood the
Captain's "comfortable looking quarters," where Ellen
Stuckey, a mulatto sentenced for murder and the sole woman assigned to
the quarries, likely worked as a domestic servant. (63) A whitish path
worn into granite led away from the yard, through another barbed wire
fence and up the slope of the mountain. (64) The half-mile path marked
the trail where convict's boots trod from their quarters to the
quarry site and hack again. A contingent of guards looked down from a
central point atop the mountain, rifles across their shoulders,
bloodhounds on chains resting in whatever meager shade they could find.
Below, nearer where the convicts worked with air-driven drills to break
the stone from the earth, guards sat on improvised chairs--barrels,
boxes, or unusable stone. (65) Prisoners stood, heaved stone, and swung
hammers. They were afforded few opportunities to sit in the shade.

As elsewhere in the convict lease, prisoners in the capitol
quarries were not separated by race. Segregation was not yet developed
as a technology of racial differentiation, though its implementation in
Texas prisons would be understood by whites as a sign of social
progress. A Special Correspondent writing under the byline
"Ralphine" described the quarries in the Austin Daily
Statesman. The whole lot of prisoners were beyond the pale of human
compassion, she believed, even those who were sickly and dying. Seeing
the convicts eat with unwashed fingers made her doubt that any of them
were human at all, and confirmed her belief that they deserved the
suffering they endured. In a moment she described as one of feminine
weakness, she felt pity for those prisoners dying in the bunkhouse,
without a "woman's hand" to care for them. She quickly
changed her mind. "They had placed themselves beyond the pale of
things like these and were paying the penalty of violated law."
Describing the filth of the quarry as "inexpressibly
revolting," Ralphine decided that the conditions were
"calculated to inspire a wholesome aversion to that sort of life
and a salutary respect for the law." If her readers could not
witness the punishment themselves, her reporting ensured that convict
labor granted a pedagogical lesson in respect for state power and the
law. (66)

When the Scots cutters arrived in Texas, they joined a diverse
group of prisoners. If Alexander Greig was troubled by the number of
black women and men he saw on his travels, he might have been relieved
to know that the capitol quarries were disproportionately populated by
white and Mexican prisoners. Ralphine saw the quarry prisoners as an
undifferentiated and wholly wicked lot, but prison officials
increasingly felt otherwise. Though no means of racial segregation
existed in the quarries, such provisions were in fact being developed on
a system-wide basis, Indeed, assignment to the quarries was a highly
privileged job among the range of degradations that the convict lease
offered. Officials conceived of "white" work forces and
"colored" work forces, and the prison administration assigned
these groups to specific locations based upon their racial
identification. Because Mexicans did not easily fit the Southern binary,
their position in penal racial hierarchies was somewhat ambiguous. As a
result, Mexicans were included among the white forces. As a result, they
might be best understood as "not-black," rather than as being
fully or even marginally white. They escaped the full insult of the
prison's treatment, which was increasingly reserved for black
inmates.

Black prisoners were channeled to the sugarcane and cotton fields,
where punishments, hygiene, conditions, and mortality rates were
nightmarish. Ninety-nine of the 124 prisoners outside the walls who died
between November 1, 1886 and October 31, 1888, died at farms. Yet
official explanations for shocking mortality rates on prison farms
dismissed both violence and putrid conditions as their cause. On the
contrary, Prison Superintendent T.J. Goree and its physician, Dr.
Jameson, were convinced that the high mortality rate in the cane fields
was black prisoners' own fault. Goree asserted that black prisoners
arrived at "the penitentiary with the seeds of disease in their
system, which does not show when received." Illness apparently lay
dormant among the lazy, as black criminals were believed to be, but,
opined Goree, it "rapidly develops when the convict is put to hard
labor." Thus the prison administration blamed black workers for the
diseases they acquired while working for the state and on lease to
private farms. (67) Black prisoners, then, were denied not just
political citizenship in the franchise, or the substantive citizenship
that economic independence would promise, but often their very lives.
Here, they might easily be worked to death. Quarry prisoners might have
had no "woman's hand" to care for them, as Ralphine
reflected, but even modest state paternalism was superior to the
outright neglect of the lease. Criminal conviction denied them political
or economic rights to control of themselves or their labor, but white
and Mexican prisoners' lives were marginally more valued.

Goree quickly transferred available white work forces to the
quarries when the opportunity arose, removing them from the cane farms
and the paired dangers of disease and guard violence. He also found
medical justification. Haywood Brahan, the Financial Agent for the
Penitentiaries, wrote that "white men could not stand the miasmic
influences of the Brazos bottoms and retain their health," and
thereby justified their transfer. (68) Some black prisoners would be
assigned to the quarries on an ad hoc basis, as workers were needed or
newly-arrived but unassigned prisoners needed to be dispensed with.

Differences between the quarry prisoners and the general prison
system demonstrate the quarries' privileged status within the
lease, protecting whites and further degrading black prisoners. (69) By
two significant measures--education and crime committed--prisoners at
quarries and those assigned elsewhere were remarkably similar. All
prisoners were overwhelmingly poor and uneducated, Just three percent of
quarry prisoners were listed as having a "fair" or
"good" education, while ninety-seven percent listed common,
limited, or no education at all, which made them roughly comparable to
the rest of the prison system. The crimes that prisoners committed
system-wide and in the quarries were also quite similar, though quarry
prisoners were somewhat more frequently (29 percent) convicted of
violent acts than the general prison population (28 percent). The
inverse held true for property offences: seventy-two percent of all
prisoners were convicted of property crimes, while slightly fewer,
seventy-one percent of quarry prisoners were convicted of property
crimes. (70) More differences existed when examining inmates'
occupations. Quarry prisoners listed some trade or profession more often
than the rest of the prison population. Twenty percent of the quarry
prisoners had named trades, though these were often relatively unskilled
professions--cooks and barbers were listed alongside machinists, cowboys
and vaqueros. Seven percent of quarry prisoners were farmers, and four
percent might be classified as professionals: doctor, engineer, etc.
(71) The remaining seventy percent were unskilled workers. In contrast,
eighty-three percent of the whole prison population were unskilled
workers.

Yet the most important difference between quarry prisoners and the
rest of the prison system came in terms of race. After all, when prison
officials wrote of a de-site to transfer inmates to the quarries, they
referred to their race, not their skill levels. Relative to the rest of
the prison population, inmates at the quarries were disproportionately
white or Mexican. In 1886, black prisoners were 51 percent of the total
inmate population, but just fourteen percent of quarry prisoners.
Thirty-nine percent of all prisoners were white, but sixty-four percent
of prisoners at the quarries were white. Mexicans comprised nine percent
of the total prison population, but were twenty-two percent of the
quarries' prisoners. (72)

Conditions in the Burnet and Oatmanville quarries were undoubtedly
better than those in plantations and on railroad crews. Despite reports
of unsavory food at the quarries, it was almost certainly superior to
the rations provided by lessees to convicts working on private farms.
Superintendant Goree also pointed out another difference, reporting
"the discipline is no where better than at these two camps."
(73) One important factor was that, unlike the farms where black
prisoners were leased, guards at the quarries were state employees, and
were compelled to obey whatever modest paternal oversight was offered.
Thus guards' violence was disciplined at the quarries, as much as
prisoners' behavior was. In addition, the large number of prisoners
at the quarries justified a large guard force in ways that smaller
railroad assignments did not, and officials believed that this economy
of scale benefited control. Moreover, the actual space of the quarry
contributed to more effective discipline. Perched on high positions at
the top of the mountain, guards' relatively clear lines of sight
allowed for more thorough and preventive surveillance, and thus
mitigated the uses of physical violence to prevent escapes, as was the
case on prison farms and railroad camps.

Just because this was a relatively privileged assignment, within
the Texas lease's race and labor hierarchies did not mean that
prisoners worked willingly or happily. They opposed the terms of their
incarceration in numerous ways, from breaking tools to working slowly,
mouthing off to guards and to each other. They escaped in significant
numbers--the most spectacular of these involved eight black and white
men who stole a train to make their getaway. Punishment logs reflected
these and other transgressions. Fifteen lashes for impudence here,
twenty lashes for laziness there; twenty more for refusing to work.
Daniel Mclvor got eight lashes for waving his hat and cheering while
other men ran off. (74) Though many were punished for resisting, others
were also rewarded for obedience. When Antonio Flores attacked a guard
in an escape attempt', Felix Jones, a black prisoner, killed him.
(75) Rather than joining in the escape, Jones "came to the rescue
of Capt. M. Ezell ... when he was murderously assaulted. (76) It is
impossible to say if Jones was a trustee, or if he felt that he was
doing his duty and earning good time towards his legal release. Jones
had been ten years old when the Civil War ended. Perhaps he had known
enough whipping then, and knew enough to find the best way to avoid
more. In any case, Jones's sentence was commuted from twenty to
five years for this "extra-meritous conduct."

In contrast to successful resistance, which would have generally
escaped witnesses, state-inflicted violence was meant to be seen and
known by prisoners. Convicts at the quarries and elsewhere were whipped,
hanged from their thumbs, put in stocks, or placed in the "dark
cell"--the duration of each torture depended on various exchange
values of misconduct and intended levels of pain. The impact of the lash
was on a prisoner's back; but it was also in other prisoners'
eyes. Like the capitol itself, scars made from a two-inch-wide greased
rawhide strap constituted a text meant to be understood by people who
could neither read nor write, or who did or did not understand the
state's favored English. (77)

Prisoners smoked cigarettes, talked, gambled, and probably sang
when guards were unwilling or unable to enforce disciplinary silence.
Some fought, some had sex, and most simply survived under brutal
conditions. Some did not, and mortality rates in the quarries topped 6
percent. (78) Many, however, were not placated with infrapolitical
resistance and rebelled more violently. They were neither working class
heroes nor were they helpless martyrs in the face of capitalist
development. They were sometimes violent, sometimes docile people, not
terribly different from other poor men in Texas. The Bourbon democratic
state sought to discipline and instruct behavior proper to the changing
political economy of white rule. As evidenced by their consistent
punishment, convicted workers resisted these imposed norms of behavior
and whatever "honest" work ethic punishment was supposed to
entail.

Neither members of the Granite Cutters Unions nor the Knights of
Labor needed to spend time in the capitol quarries or see a whipping to
know that they opposed the exploitation of convict labor or competition
with imported contract workers like the Scots. The cutters might have
had few legal defenses against employers who exploited prisoners to
build the State Capitol, but at least the Foran Act, passed in 1885,
would protect them from competition with foreign contract workers. When
the NGCU brought suit against the Capitol builders for violation of the
Foran Act, they sought legal protection for themselves, but also a
showcase trial to benefit other organized workers; it was their final
effort to reclaim some meaning and power from the Capitol building
project.

The Foran Act's history would suggest that the NGCU had a
strong case against the capitol builders for importing the Aberdoninan
strikebreakers under contract. The original impetus behind the Act came
from skilled workers organized under Window Glass Workers Assembly 300,
whose situation bore an uncanny resemblance to the granite
cutters'. Like the NGCU, the Window Glass Workers Union had been in
a position to demand high wages in western, labor-scarce areas, and
tried to raise all window glass workers' wages. In response, the
glass workers' employers contracted skilled European glass blowers
to break their strike. (79) Though skilled unionists drove the Foran
Act, contributing much evidence to Congressional debates and some
language of the Act itself, on the floor of the Congress, its language
was quickly racialized--something by no means antithetical to the
unionists' perspective. To no small measure the Foran Act became an
effort to stigmatize European immigrants as ineligible for citizenship,
much as the 1882 Exclusion Act had done to the Chinese. (80) After
offering evidence drawn directly from the Window Glass Workers'
experiences, Ohio Congressman Martin Foran, who oversaw the bill's
passage in the House of Representatives, quickly turned to the racial
dangers that contract workers posed. Immigrant workers would lead to low
wages for all, he suggested, threatening the nation's foundation in
republican citizenship: "Low wages mean cheap men, ignorant,
degraded, dangerous citizens. ... Low wages signify debasement,
ignorance, degradation, brutality. High wages signify intelligence,
ingenuity, invention, and a higher order of manhood." (81) The
Knights' Terrence Powderly furthered the nativist opprobrium:
"We have Hungarians at work who are no more fit to live in this
country than a hog is fit to grace a parlor." (82) If the Act was
conceived by skilled workers to exclude skilled immigrants under
contract, its language emphasized the dangers of unskilled, debased, and
racialized pauper labor. (83) It was the latter meaning and memory that
took hold among activists and historians alike. Nevertheless, based on
their intimate knowledge of the Foran Act, the Granite Cutters knew that
Wilke and the Syndicate had acted illegally. Having paid the travels and
contracted the Scots to come to Texas, the Capitol builders violated the
law to the very letter. (84)

The day George Berry and the Scots arrived at Castle Garden, NGCU
representatives implored them not to go to Texas, and met with the U.S.
District Attorney to press charges against the Capitol Syndicate. The
U.S. District Attorney initially dismissed the granite cutters'
tickets as insufficient evidence of the Syndicate's violation of
the Foran Act. However, Union representatives, apparently more familiar
with the Act than the U.S. Attorney, demonstrated that the law forbade
an employer to prepay an immigrant's transportation. The Attorney
advised the granite cutters to bring suit against Wilke in Texas. With
the help of the Austin-based 78th District Assembly of the Knights of
Labor, they did just that. (85) In the meantime, they gathered evidence
from the Scots who broke from the Texas party, including full evidence
of contracts provided and passage paid.

Armed with the Foran Act, the Granite Cutters' Union undertook
suit against the Capitol Syndicate, but found their way barred time and
again. The Capitol Syndicate's case was helped when railroad
magnate Jay Gould, seeing this as another front in his counterattack
against the Knights of Labor, offered the Syndicate his lawyer's
service. (86) Nevertheless, the NGCU brought the case forward in Austin,
and in July 1886 the U.S. District Attorney filed charges against Wilke
and the Capitol Syndicate.

Almost immediately, Wilke and the Syndicate mounted a public
defense against the charges. When asked by reporters, Wilke claimed the
Scots came "in answer to an advertisement" and "were not
solicited or paid to do so," though this was patently untrue. Wilke
and the Syndicate also began to parse differences between skilled and
unskilled workers to justify their actions. They insisted they had not
"brought any laborers from Scotland ..., but skilled
granitecutters." (87) The distinctions Wilke and the Syndicate
drew, then, addressed not the letter of the law, which clearly
prohibited paying for travel, or the unionists' original intent
behind the act, which was to prevent the importation of skilled
strikebreakers. Instead, Wilke shifted attention to the Foran Act's
nativist dimensions, the elements that Rogers M. Smith would call
"ascriptive inegalitarian" citizenship, stressing the debased
and servile nature of the immigrants that Foran would prevent from
entry. (88) Because the Scots were skilled men, Wilke reasoned, they
should not be excluded. It seems that Emigration Board members and
Congressional investigators were compelled by the logic differentiating
the Scots from "other" migrants, and they frequently stressed
the Scots' identity as skilled tradesmen. One Commissioner
reportedly believed that if all immigrants who came to the U.S. were
like the Scots cutters: "strong, skillful mechanics with money in
their pockets," then they were welcome. (89) As a result, the Foran
Act was understood as only partially applicable to the Aberdonians. The
gendered implications and stated skill levels indicated to this
official, at least, that the Scots had the prerequisites for citizenship
and national entry, while unskilled and poverty-stricken migrants did
not. (90) Despite the original drive behind Foran, this new meaning,
wholly focused on pauper and servile labor, took sway, to the
Syndicate's benefit and the NGCU's loss.

For reasons that remain murky, the hearings were postponed until
August 1887. This delaying tactic, repeated numerous times, would blunt
the fervor and excitement of what might have become a symbolically
important labor victory. When the case came to trial in August 1887,
depositions from the Scots cutters were taken, but yet again, the trial
was postponed, and the District Attorney moved to strike the names of
the most prestigious members of the Capitol Syndicate from the
indictment. Both of the Farwells and Babcock were removed from the
investigation, thereby robbing the Union's case of its most
sensational elements. Stressing credulity further, the U.S. Marshall
claimed to have been wholly unable to serve papers on Abner Taylor, and
Congress declined to appropriate money to carry out the Court. Yet even
this was insufficient, it seems, in preventing the trial from taking
place. On the day set for the District Attorney to take testimony, he
was called out of town. Knights and Union officers had to secure lawyers
on short notice, though the Capitol Syndicate's lawyers were well
prepared for the cross-examination. (91)

Despite concerted and effective tactics to blunt its impact, as the
first real test of the Foran Act, the case garnered national attention.
(92) A House Investigative Committee formed in 1888 to examine
violations of the Act in its three years of existence. Testimony
gathered added to the evidentiary basis of the Granite Cutters'
case, which finally came to trial in August 1889. The four most
important members of the Capitol Syndicate were removed from the case:
the firm of Taylor, Babcock, and Company successfully argued that it had
"let" the contract to Wilke, and therefore its members had
nothing at all to do with the employment of convicts or hiring of Scots.
Gus Wilke stood alone, and acknowledged full responsibility in the face
of overwhelming evidence. (93) Because he had overseen the importation
of sixty-four cutters--the number who had arrived finally in
Texas--Wilke was liable for $64,000 as penalty. Yet Wilke successfully
applied for a stay to appeal for executive clemency. He did not receive
it, but inexplicably, in March 1893, the Clerk of the District Court in
Austin received word that Wilke would be liable for just. $8,000 and
costs rather than the full $64,000 dollars. Perhaps the letter from the
Honorable Gilbert A. Pierce, a U.S. Senator from North Dakota (with no
discernible interests in a sub-contractor in Austin), played a role in
swaying the decision. Perhaps this Senator, surely on at least friendly
working terms with Senator Farwell and Congressman Taylor, exerted some
influence. Perhaps because the Scots were skilled workers, of relatively
unquestioned manhood and whiteness, officials believed that Wilke
violated the letter of the Foran Act, but not its newer, nativist
spirit. Whatever the reason, the Knights of Labor and the newly-formed
American Federation of Labor took a justifiably cynical tone. In a
letter to the President, they implored that "the law not be
tampered with, but carried out to the full extent, the same as if the
defendant was a person without [the] influence of a syndicate backing
him up." (94) Recent scholarship suggests that the non-enforcement
of the Foran Act reflected rapid shifts in doctrinal interpretation of
the Foran Act toward "liberty of contract" in the late 19th
century. (95) Yet the Granite cutters had reason to believe that simpler
forces of cronyism were at work. As would become clear in coming years,
organized labor, and especially the AFL, would find little support and
much antagonism from the judiciary, increasingly turning toward a narrow
philosophy of labor voluntarism. (96) Their legal victory came in name
only.

As granite cutters lamented, the law treated Gustav Wilke and the
Capitol Syndicate quite differently than it did a poor Mexican horse
thief, a poor white fence cutter, or a black burglar. The Janus face of
justice was not lost on the Granite Cutters' Union:

Constructing the capitol was more than just another building
project, and the actors involved knew it to be such. It was symbolic of
larger structures and designs, filled with contested meanings and
implications for those involved in the building process, and those who
would witness its lessons. Corporate and state power solidified control
in the face of working peoples' sometimes violent, sometimes
litigious opposition. Nonetheless, organized workers, racialized and
criminalized subjects, and the Scots who gave testimony of the
state's own illegality contested the rule of the state and the
market. The Texas capitol, with its multiple meanings of power, control
and legitimacy, was one of its most sophisticated and durable
instruments.

Officials understood leasing prisoners to build the capitol as a
success for the prison system--it occupied the time of nearly 500
prisoners, helped keep many white prisoners from the malarial
bottomlands while keeping black prisoners in those profitable but horrid
farms, and helped develop emergent techniques of racial segregation in
the prison system. Moreover, the prisoners earned a tidy profit of
$14,114.40 for the state, far surpassing all the expenses spent on
feeding, guarding, and punishing them. (98) Wilke also did well for
himself. When he returned to Chicago in 1890, he did so a millionaire.
(99)

Members of the organized working class would look at the new
capitol and know that state power had favored their exploiters over
themselves, effectively dismissing their claims to substantive
citizenship in contradiction to its own laws. Ralphine, The Austin
Statesman's Special Correspondent, reflected more positively in her
account of the Granite Mountain tour and waxed poetic about the final
destination of the gleaming granite blocks before her. A true patriot,
she mused about "THAT BEAUTIFUL NASCENT BUILDING, to which all
faithful Texans will, incoming [sic] years, turn their eyes, perhaps,
when they pray." (100) Joaquin Duran, and other convicted workers
who contributed to this capitol, would certainly have other, more
critical thoughts, as they looked toward the fruit of their labor, a
symbol of government that would scarcely be theirs.

(2.) Sec stories in the Aberdeen Evening Express, the Evening
Gazette. Aberdeen Journal across March and April 1886, but especially
"Aberdeen Emigrants Bound for Texas," Aberdeen Evening
Gazette, March 15, 1886, p2. Aberdeen Public Library (APL).

(3.) National Granite Cutters' Union Journal, May 1886,
International Granite Cutters Association, ppl-2 Folder 1, Box 2E309, in
The Labor Movement in Texas Papers (LMTP), Center for American History,
Austin, Texas. All references to Granite Cutters' circulars are
from this archive.

(4.) Literature an the lease focuses primarily on its role in
securing racialized labor relations in a stage between slavery and
industrial capitalism in a peripheral economic region The implications
of market faces are necessarily global in scope, but seldom do analyses
of the convict lease actually assess those global components. Moreover,
literature on the lease has tended to he too homogeneous. The lease was
brutal everywhere, but, as will be argued below, it was not everywhere
the same. Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political
Economy of the Convict Lease in the New South (New York, 1996); Edward
L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Violence in the 19th-Century
South (New York, 1984). See, however, Mathew Mancini, One Dies, Get
Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928 (Columbia,
1996). On Texas prisons, Donald R. Walker, Penology for Profit (College
Station, 1988); Paul M. Lucko, "Prison Farms, Walls, and Society:
Punishment and Politics in Texas, 1848--1910," (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Texas, Austin, 1999); Robert Reps Perkinson. "The
Birth of the Texas Prison Empire, 1865--1915," (Ph.D. Dissertation,
Yale University, 2001).

(5.) I am indebted to Alice Kessler-Harris's definition of
economic citizenship: "the independent status that provides the
possibility of full participation in the polity." In Pursuit of
Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in
20th-Century America (New York, 2001), 5.

(7.) Frederick W. Rathjen, "The Texas State House: A Study of
the Building of the Texas Capitol Based on the Reports of the Capitol
Building Commissioners," Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 60,4
(1957), 433--462.

(9.) Broadly, William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and
the Great West (New York, 1991); specifically, David Montejano, Anglos
and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836--1986 (Austin, 1987), 62-3,
86.

(11.) Third Biennial Report of the Capitol Building Commission
[henceforth CBC], November 1, 1886 (Austin: Triplett and Hutchings,
State Printers, 1886), 31,32, and Exhibit J, 201.

(12.) July 16, 1885 correspondence from Abner Taylor to the Capitol
Building Commission, in Third Report of the CBC, 31, 32.

(13.) ibid., Exhibit H, 198, and Exhibit K, 203-205.

(14.) ibid., July 18, 1885 meeting, 34. We can surmise that
petitions came from the NGCU or locals of the Knights of Labor. See
various articles Box 2E309, Folder 14, LMTP.

(15.) These dates are derived from the "location"
listings in the Conduct Registers.

(16.) Walker, Penology for Profit, 79, 83. On the convict lease,
Ayers, Vengeance and Justice; Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free
Labor; Mancini, One Dies, Get Another; Karin A. Shapiro, A New South
Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfield,
1871--1896 (Chapel Hill, 1998).

(17.) Walker, Penology for Profit, 113. Incarceration rates bear
little correspondence to actual crimes committed, but rather reflect
social and political decisions around social control. George Rusche and
Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New Brunswick, 2003
[1939]), and more recently, Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New
York, 2003).

(19.) David Garland, "Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public
Torture Lynching in Twentieth-Century America," Law and Society
Review, 39, 4 (2005), 793-834: William D. Carrigan, The Making of a
Lynching Culture; Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916
(Urbana, 2006).

(24.) Report of the Commission Appointed by the Governor, 1875, pp.
100-105, in Walker, Penology for Profit, 38.

(25.) Oshinksy, Worse than Slavery, 61.

(26.) Perkinson," The Texas Prison Empire," esp. Ch 3.

(27.) Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 198-199.

(28.) Builders requested prisoners to lover costs after the switch
to granite, but Wilke had solicited fifty convicts to work in the
Oatmanville quarries prior to the switch. See J.T. Dickinson
correspondence to Wilke, June 15, 1883, Penitentiary Records 4-2/1250
pp. 39, 44. TSLAC. William Elton Green brought this and other important
documents to my attention.

(29.) Austin Statesman, December 10, 1885.

(30.) Correspondence from Lawrence Foley of the Granite
Cutters' International Association of America to Ben L. Owens,
August 29, 1938. LMTP, box 2E309, Folder 1. There is some confusion over
the "Bill of Prices" that Wilke offered. Harper records
Graniteville Prices as $2.75-$3.00 per day, which I found to be the
Quincy, Massachusetts, Bill of Prices. The sources I have examined show
Graniteville prices at $3.50 per day.

(31.) September 1885 NGCU Journal.

(32.) On "skill" as politically charged term, see Devon
G. Pena, Terror of the Machine (Austin, 1997), 179, 180; and Ava Baron,
"Gender and Labor History: Learning form the Past, Looking to the
Future," in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American
Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca, 1991), 14.

(33.) October 1885 NGCU Journal. One source reports 560-1 and
others show 500-1 voting for the boycott. Nevertheless, support for the
boycott was overwhelming.

(38.) The resolution was made by the Capitol Assembly Knights of
Labor 2182 on December 3 1885. See Folder 1, Granite Cutters
International Association, pp 4-5, LMTP.

(39.) On the connections between property value in labor,
whiteness, and citizenship, see especially Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal
Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor
(Cambridge, MA, 2002). Gunther Peck stresses that white slavery
metaphors should he read as strategic statements rather than as strict
expressions of identity Peck, "White Slavery and Whiteness: A
Transnational View of the Sources of Working-Class Radicalism and
Racism," Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas,
1, 2 (2004), 41--63, esp. 53.

(40.) There is no indication that once free, these workers would
refuse organization, or that the Union would be willing to extend
membership to black or Mexican workers, despite the Knights of
Labors' biracialism in Texas or its relative inclusivity
nationwide. Theresa Case, "The Radical Potential of the
Knights' Biracialism: The 1885--1886 Gould System Strikes and Their
Aftermath," Labor: Studies in Working-Class History or the
Americas, 4, 4 (2007), 83--107, esp.96--99. Leon Fink, Workingmen's
Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, 1983),
and "The New Labor History and the Powers of historical Pessimism:
Consensus, Hegemony, and the Case of the Knights of labor," Journal
of American History, 75, 1 (1988), 115--136.

(41.) This fear eventually came true. Though perhaps Goree
embellished the truth to make the system seem more benevolent than it
actually was, he reported that one third of the convicts in the quarries
"have become very good stone and granite cutters." 1886
Biennial Report, 20.

(49.) "Aberdeen--Emigration of Granite Cutters to the United
States," Aberdeen Journal, April 13, 1886, p4, University of
Aberdeen Special Library and Archives (UASLA). It is possible that Hall
took his own advice. One Robert Hall appeared among the Scots in Texas.
However, a different nineteen-year-old Robert Hall, unmarried and whose
profession was listed as Mason, also appeared in the 1881 Aberdonian
census. Given the tendency for established builders to remain and for
younger, less established ones to travel, it is more likely that this
was the younger Hall. 1881 Census, Microfiche p. 02035, Aberdeen and
Northeastern Scotland Family History Society, Aberdeen.

(55.) Immigrants' own understandings of their racial
identities was lacking in early whiteness literature. Eric Arnesen,
"Whiteness and the Historian's Imagination,"
International Labor and Working Class History, 60 (2001), 3-32; Kevin
Kenny, "Violence, Race, and anti-Irish Sentiment in the Nineteenth
Century," in J. J. Lee and Marion Casey, eds., Making the Irish
American: The History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States
(New York, 2006), 289-301.

(60.) NGCU Journal, Feb 1886, May 1886, Sept 1886. See also the
letter from "Western Tramp," published in the Dec 1886
Journal. NGCU references to the Scots as prostitutes were oblique, but
when they called George Berry a "pimp," they participated in
what Peck identifies as the feminization of white slavery discourse.
Peck, "White Slavery and Whiteness," 47.

(64.) Although the uses of barbed wire in inflicting pain on cattle
was just becoming apparent, it seems its uses on humans were already
evident. Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: an Ecology of Modernity (Middle-town,
2004).

(65.) "Letter from Burnet," Austin Daily Statesman, April
13, 1886.

(66.) Apparently a number of tours did go through the capitol
quarries. Ralphine asked a guard if many people toured the grounds.
"Oh, yes," he replied, "lots of them every day, and more
on Sundays than other days." Beside her own group, there "were
five other wagon loads" of quests visiting the quarry. "Letter
From Burnet," April 13, 1886 Austin Daily Statesman."

(67.) 1888 Biennial Report, 5-7.

(68.) 1886 Biennial Report, 69.

(69.) I collected data from convict ledgers and conduct registers,
recording those prisoners whose locations listed "Oatmanville"
or "Rock Quarry" among the farms and railroad assignments. My
data set consists of 253 prisoners, just over half of the total number
of prisoners assigned to the quarries.

(70.) These numbers are calculated from my own data, and are
compared to Walker, Penology for Profit, Table 8, 121. Walker only
counted crimes listed for which there were more than twenty convictions.
I define violent crimes as murder, assault, sodomy, and rape. Where
violence was involved in property crime ie, assault and robbery, it is
counted as violent. Property crimes are defined as theft, theft of
horse, burglary, forgery, arson, embezzlement, etc. Because bigamy does
not fit easily in either category, I have not counted it here.

(71.) I categorize inmates by profession as 1) laborer, 2) farmer,
3) specified/skilled laborer, and 4) professional. Skilled/specified
workers were a diverse group and could include such workers as
hatmakers, cowboy/vaqueros, brushmakers, carpenters, cooks, miners,
railroaders, painters, barbers, silversmiths, machinists. Professional
here were physicians, engineers, photographers, plus one trader and one
gambler.

(72.) Walker, Penology for Profit, Table 2, 114. One factor chat
complicates comparison is that race was not directly noted in the
ledgers I use (and these are the only places where assignment is
recorded), though it was tabulated in the Annual Reports Walker uses for
the prison overall. However, "Complexion, Hair and Eye color"
were noted in the ledgers. For my calculations of quarry prisoners, I
count as Black those prisoners who had "Black" or
"Mulatto" written across or in all three of the categories.
Mexicans were the same. Whites, however, had much greater variation in
each category, listing, for example, fair, dark, sallow, or sandy in
complexion, etc. I count these as White. In one case (Dick Smith, Rusk
#2136), an inmate's complexion was listed as dark but his hair and
eyes as "mulatto" and thus he is dealt with here as
Black/mulatto. In another case, Francisco Fuentes, born in Mexico,
Huntsville#2973, is listed as "Dark" complexion, Brown eyes
and black hair. Here I count him as Mexican.

(77.) Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery, 66. On brutality in the Texas
lease, see Walker, esp. 126-142.

(78.) Calculated from Convict Records, Conduct Registers.

(79.) Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant,
141-142, 145; 148-166; 154-158. Erickson argues that one reason the
Foran Act met little opposition was that manufacturers recognized what a
small threat it posed to their business 159.

(80.) Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants .in American
Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 (Ithaca,
1986), 18.

(89.) "Arrivals at Castle Garden," New York Times, April
30 1886, p8. See also questions by Mr. Guenther and testimony by David
Dorson. House Misc. Documents No 572, 50th Congress 1st Session, 1888,
Serial 2579, 146-149.

(90.) At least some of the Scots indicated that they intended to
become citizens. "Scotch Contract Labor," New York Times, Jul
31, 1888, p8.

(91.) Allen, "The Capitol Boycott," 322-333.

(92.) The first review of Foran was more refinement than test.
United States vs. Craig, Records of the United States Supreme Court,
1886, in Federal Reporter (Washington, D. C, 1886), 795-802.

(93.) "Employed No Convicts," Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov.
6 1888, p3.

(94.) Quoted in Allen, "Capitol Boycott," 24.

(95.) Peck, Reinventing Free Labor, 85-86.

(96.) Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants; William E. Forbath, Law
and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA, 1989).

Granite Cutters keep away from Austin, Texas, until the contractors
stop hiring convicts on the Austin .State Capitol building.
The subcontractor said he would hire convicts, scabs and imported
contract labor. Granite Cutters of America, show ... the Chicago
Syndicate, that free men will not submit to the introduction of
slavery into our trade under the guise of contract convict labor,
and that you will not teach our trade to convicts to enrich these
schemers, who care for nothing hut the almighty dollar and now
seek to degrade our trade to fill their pockets. (29)

for any person, company, partnership or corporation ... to prepay
the transportation or in any way assist or cue outage the
importation ... of any alien ... into the United States ... under
contract ... made previous to the importation or migration of
such alien ... to perform labor or service of any kind.

Wilke pleaded guilty, and judgments were given against him, yet he
is allowed practically to go free and laugh at the law, but if some
poor starving fellow steals a loaf of bread there is no "stay of
proceedings" granted to him, he has no syndicate with political
influence and capital to hack him and he must suffer. (97)